What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I’m going to cheat a little in answering this. Technically, Jeanette Winterson is a poet. But it’s for her novels that she’s better known. And it was her Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit that hit me like a truck when I first came to writing. More – it made me a writer. In her debut, Winterson fed autobiographical detail through fable and flights of imagination. She could easily have told her story straight. She didn’t. This blew my fucking mind. In fact, it was because of this novel that I came to understand (after several failed attempts at a novel of my own) that even though my poetry is always rooted in truth, it’s okay to incorporate some fiction.
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